Choosing a college – Part 3

No matter how good of a player you are and no matter how many colleges come knocking on your door, you still have the difficult job of selecting the right school for you. This is usually not an easy decision to make. However, with the right priorities in order, the process can become a little more structured than just throwing dart at a board of schools.

Below are what I believe to be the two most important areas for a player to analyze during the search process. Notice that “baseball” is not one of the two priorities.

Academics: It is listed first because by far, it is the most important reason why you go to school. Baseball, if you’re extremely lucky, may last you another 10 years. Your education will follow you forever. At some point, someone will tell you that you are no longer good enough to play. Hopefully that will not occur in college but it will happen sooner or later no matter how good you are. After that is when you need to be able to fall back on something. I cannot tell you how many guys I saw in the minor leagues who, after getting released, sobbed not just because baseball was over but because they knew they had nothing else to fall back on. Choosing to leave baseball was one of my top most excruciating moments of my life. The fact that I had a great education from a great school (Villanova University) allowed me to control the leaving process when I knew it was over.

Choose a school first and foremost because it is a good academic fit for you. That means the school has a good reputation for preparing students in your chosen major or at least has a large selection to choose from when you do decide. The rigor level of the courses should be challenging enough as well.

Baseball is icing. Your education is the cake.

Environment: If you are lucky to play at the college level, your coach will have you for many hours. It is a year-round commitment that can have you playing, practicing, traveling, and working out quite a bit. That being said, even if you are playing the role of baseball player for, let’s say, 4 hours every day, you still have 20 hours to live on your campus. You’d better like the campus because whether you are playing or not, most of the next four years will be spent there.

Think about some of the following before choosing a campus:

Do you want to live far away from home or close?

How far or how close?

Would you like an urban or rural location?

Small school or large school?

There are about a thousand other questions you could ask but the point is to actually ask them so that you know if the school fits your wants and needs.

After all those are answered, ask yourself this final question … if baseball were to end tomorrow (and it could) would I still like this school? If you hesitate even a little with that answer, you may want to give that school choice some more thought.